


(I'll be under your window) in the moonlight

by heartshapedcandy



Category: Harley Quinn (Cartoon 2019)
Genre: F/F, basically canon compliant with bachelorette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:02:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26390857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartshapedcandy/pseuds/heartshapedcandy
Summary: None of this should be a problem. Ivy is an adult, she has self-control and a fiancé and morals and a fucking mortgage, but she found bruises on the inside of her thighs this morning, and pressed on them until it hurt. There’s a hickey under the curve of one breast, and lipstick staining the lace of her favorite pair of panties, and she remembers all of it.orset in the off-screen moments of episode 2.09, "bachelorette"
Relationships: Pamela Isley/Harleen Quinzel, Poison Ivy/Harley Quinn
Comments: 16
Kudos: 233





	(I'll be under your window) in the moonlight

“Tell me a secret,” Harley says. She’s looking at Ivy the way she always does, intently, eyes clear, like Ivy hadn’t just watched her try to shotgun a Four Loco in front of a gaggle of Jersey tourists.

They’re huddled over a high-top on the outer ring of the sticky, strobing dance floor in Hedonikka. Ivy is buzzed enough that she can feel the throbbing beat of the music in her chest. Her hair is damp at the nape of her neck from dancing, and whatever cocktail her cheap, plastic tiara afforded her left a cloying aftertaste at the back of her tongue.

She smells like somebody else’s perfume, and fondness surges high in her throat every time she glances across the table, sickening and unfamiliar.

Harley’s sucking hard at a cocktail through a pink crazy-straw, and even Ivy is throwing back a drink with a paper umbrella garnish. A by-product of a Bachelorette party: if it isn’t dick-shaped or neon, what’s the fucking point?

Ivy laughs, endeared despite herself. “Like what?”

Harley shrugs, tongues at the straw absently, slurping until the ice at the bottom rattles. “Something I don’t know.”

“You know everything about me worth knowing.”

Harley squints, tilts closer. “I doubt that.”

Always fidgeting, she’s rolling an empty shot glass between her fingers. It leaves her hands sticky, and when she licks tacky vodka away from the V of her fingers, Ivy looks away carefully.

“I’m an open book.” Ivy flaps her wrist weakly. “Ecoterrorism. Proper succulent care. Girl power. Yadda yadda.”

“C’mon,” Harley wheedles. She’s got her cheeks smooshed between her palms, slumping over the table. Her pointer finger is still wet. “That can’t be everything.”

Grabbing for the empty cocktail glass, Ivy slips off her bar stool. “Let me get you another drink.”

Harley captures her wrist, and holds her firm. Ivy flexes her hand in her grip. She always forgets how freakishly strong Harley is, compact and lithe, muscles cabling her forearms.

“Not so fast, Ive.” She rolls her thumb over Ivy’s pulse point, presses down, just past the threshold of pain, until the tendon in her arm clicks. “You still owe me a secret.”

She jerks her closer, and Ivy allows it, tripping a half step until they are nose to nose, her wrist still held in a vise grip.

“You first,” she says. Condensation is running under her fingertips, and the leather seat of Harley’s barstool squeaks as she leans closer.

“I’m drunk,” Harley says, clicking hard over the ‘k.” Ivy can see her tongue behind her teeth, wants suddenly to pry her jaws open, to lay some claim over her pretty mouth, over the pale skin of her throat.

Harley’s here to play, that teasing-flirty that drives Ivy up the fucking wall. Her eyes doe-wide and interested, dipping down to Ivy’s cleavage, fingers still stroking, softer now.

“That’s not a secret,” Ivy says. She wrenches her wrist from Harley’s hand. “That’s just common knowledge.”

She turns away before she can do something stupid, snags the drink, and heads for the bar. Pointedly, she doesn’t look back, but can feel Harley watching her, gaze burning like a brand.

She buys time with the bartender. Passes her a damp bill, and waves vaguely at an item on the menu with a name Harley would like.

_Dirty Girl Scout. Slippery Nipple. Sex on the Beach._ Whatever. 

She feels a pressure at her back and tenses, but when she half-turns, it’s just Selina. She’s smirking into the rim of her whiskey like she’s getting paid to do it.

Ivy looks at her, eyes narrowed. Doesn’t give her the chance to speak, just holds up a finger. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You don’t have to.”

Selina raises an eyebrow. It communicates more than Ivy wants to hear.

“Really. Stop.”

“Ivy,” she says, the syllable a husk, all cigar-smoke and sultry, “there’s no shame in it.” She leans closer, enough that Ivy can smell the polish she rubs into the leather of her catsuit. “I’m just hurt you didn’t ask me first.”

“Oh my God.” Ivy buries her head in her hands. “I don’t know what you heard –”

“Enough,” Selina interjects –

“—But it isn’t true.” The bartender returns with the drink and Ivy accepts it with shaking hands. “Harley and I are just friends. Best friends.”

“I’ve taken many women as lovers,” Selina says, steamrolling the tail end of Ivy’s sentence, “I’ve found it more than satisfactory.”

“Oh my _God_.” This, again. Three octaves higher. “I have to go.”

Selina has apparently already lost interest in the conversation, one hand sneaking into the pocket of the woman at the bar behind her. Ivy claims her as a lost cause, turns away with her ears burning.

Harley isn’t at the table when she comes back, but she spots blonde pigtails disappearing around the corner to the bathroom, and follows, lengthening her stride. Stupid, stupid. The drink is sweating in her palm, the garish straw bobbing.

Best friend, she reminds herself. Best friend. Best friend. Best friend.

Then, Selina’s words, landing somewhere between her legs – _more than satisfactory._

Harley is waiting for her around the bend, eyes owl-wide, flush with alcohol and the close-heat of the hallway. The bubblegum-rap spewing from the overhead speakers sounds distorted this far from the dancefloor, like they’ve submerged themselves deep in the gut of the club, humid and shining with sweat.

She’s tilted against the wall, hands knotted behind her back. Waiting. She knew Ivy would follow. Ivy hates being fucking predictable.

“I want to kiss you again,” Harley blurts, all at once, just like that. “That’s my secret.” A pause. “Not that you asked.”

Ivy’s panting a bit from her brisk walk, caught off-kilter, still thinking about Harley’s lips wrapped around the mouth of the pink fucking straw.

She stares, and works hard to remind herself that she is being played. She’s watched Harley play this game enough, always hungry for warm bodies she isn’t allowed to have. Happy to flirt and fuck and toy until the object of her affection wants her back. Then, like an expiration date, she sours.

But she’s batting those dolled-up eyes, thrusting out her chest, and worming closer to Ivy until she can feel the heat coming off her in waves.

Harley panics at Ivy’s silence, bullies a hand through her own hair. “I haven’t stopped thinking about it since it happened, and you smell so good, and I think that I want to –"

The drink shatters against the club floor, splashing their ankles with syrup-thick liquor, glass shards halved on the linoleum.

Two hands buried in Harley’s hair, Ivy slams her bodily against the wall of the club, pressing their mouths together, hard. Harley claws at the front of her jacket, tugs her closer until their hips press flush.

“Oh my God.” Harley whimpers into her mouth, sinks her teeth into her bottom lip. Her back grates against the club wall, buffing against the wallpaper of band posters and graffiti that layer the plaster in a time capsule of early-2000s pop-punk headliners.

Hands knotting in her shirt, Harley writhes, struggling. The noises she’s making almost sound pained. At first, Ivy thinks she’s trying to get out from under her, but she realizes she’s pressing up into her, like she can force her way inside her ribcage if she pushes hard enough.

Ivy wrenches away, gasping. Saliva strings between their mouths. Harley’s face looks wrecked, her expression thin and careful, like she’s ready to cringe away if Ivy reacts poorly.

“I’m—” It’s the start of an apology, and Ivy claps a hand over her mouth, leans forward until their foreheads knock.

“We’ve had a lot to drink,” Ivy says, low, like she’s already crafting an alibi.

Harley nods, head lolling, eyes wide.

“I’m going to walk you back to your room,” Ivy says.

Harley nods again.

“And then we’re going to bed, and we can act like none of this ever happened.”

Harley deflates, but presses a kiss to her palm, obliging.

If they both know she’s lying, that’s a part of the game, too.

They take the boat ride back to Themyscira in near silence, sandwiched between groups of other bargoers, cringing at the generous stomach-turn retching of a few other tequila-soaked brides-to-be’s, bent double over the stern of the boat.

Perched at the bow, salty ocean spray wets their cheeks, clinging to their clothes. Watery moonlight parts in the boat’s wake, dark water lapping and endless, sobering.

At some point, Harley takes her hand. Ivy lets her.

When Harley tugs her into her hotel room, Ivy lets her do that, too.

**

The first night was a mistake, but the second is harder to explain.

It would be easy to blame the whiskey shots, or the coke-rush of a killing spree paired with bloody environmental vengeance.

She could blame the Amazons – who really do know how to throw a fucking rager – or the euphoria of being on an all-woman island communing with nature, or even the high of a whole fuck-ton of girl-power.

She could blame Harley, who is tipping her chin to look up at her, pale skin flushed, her eyes this scary, crystal-clear, looking at Ivy like she just pulled the fucking Holy Grail out of her ass.

She could blame a lot of things, but –

“We should do more shots.”

Harley is gesturing emphatically with a handle of Jack Daniels she must have nabbed from behind the bar. The Amazon who was tending bar is puking behind a cluster of gardenias at this point, anyhow. Harley squints down at the label, unscrewing the top with her thumb.

“Shouldn’t it be, like, _Jackie_ Daniels or something? I mean, this is Themyscira.”

Despite everything, that does pull a laugh from Ivy.

“You’re so stupid,” Ivy says. She hates this. Hates the fondness dripping off her own words. “Don’t be so gender normative, just take the fucking shot.”

“God, the Sarah Lawrence just jumped out,” Harley says. But she’s obedient, tipping the bottle back against her mouth and taking a few deep pulls. Ivy watches the line of her throat with interest, watches her swallow. Harley hisses when she pulls it away, tips the bottle toward her. “Your turn, Red.”

When Ivy doesn’t respond, Harley pushes the mouth of the bottle against her lips, anyway. Ivy’s lips smudge the petal imprint Harley’s lipstick left behind, and she lets Harley slosh the liquid behind her teeth.

None of this should be a problem. Ivy is an _adult_ , she has self-control and a fiancé and morals and a fucking mortgage, but she found bruises on the inside of her thighs this morning, and pressed on them until it hurt. There’s a hickey under the curve of one breast, and lipstick staining the lace of her favorite pair of panties, and she remembers all of it.

But it’s fine, she thinks – even as Harley tilts the handle again to her mouth, chokes her with liquor until it burns going down, until she has to push her away. It’s fine. It won’t happen again.

Harley drags her out onto the makeshift dance floor, feet clumsy in the loose sand. She has Ivy’s wrist caught in her hand, and she forces the arm around her stomach, rocks back against Ivy in a sloppy grind. Her head bobs to some imagined beat and she laughs, high and young, and Ivy feels herself thawing, loosening.

Hands moving to Harley’s waist, she spins her until they are chest to chest, Harley tilting that laughing mouth toward her, teeth white and sharp in the moonlight.

“Good bachelorette?” she asks, guileless, open. 

“Best I’ve ever had,” Ivy says, finds herself gravitating toward her smile, hands cinching in the satin-soft of Harley’s shorts.

It feels suddenly impossible, somehow, to know who to blame. To know how to not make the same mistakes, again.

**

The bonfire is burning down. Nora crashed hours ago, Selina is nowhere to be found and Jennifer is passed out in a nearby shrubbery. Only a few Amazons are left, huddled in small pockets around the beach. Clusters talk in low voices, words drowned in the froth and churn of the tide, another pair coupled off and getting a little too handsy for polite company.

Sparks spit onto damp sand, and Ivy shifts, feeling the granules grit under her elbows as she reclines. Harley is beside her, loose-wristing the nearly empty whiskey, looking up at the smog-less sky, the banded milk way clearly visible, slurs of stars spiraling like folds of cloth.

“We did this,” Harley said, a little blurry, her tongue drunk-heavy and tone euphoric. “We saved all this.” She gestures broadly, whiskey sloshing, tips sideways against Harley’s shoulder. “Go us.”

“Go us,” Ivy echoes. She’s feeling it now, too, that cloudy almost-oblivion, her vison softening, a deep comfort like a weighted blanket. She turns her head, finds Harley already looking at her.

Their faces are so, so close. Harley wets her lips.

Ivy sees it in split-screen, frames shattering into trembling close-ups: the pink-wet of her tongue, the scrape of her teeth over her bottom lip, the spidery-shadow dip of her lashes, bashful and practiced.

She’s swaying forward before she can stop herself, like a fucking idiot moth dipping close to the light, thinking it’s going to end differently this time, despite the pile of ash right in front of her.

“Gimme a kiss,” Harley says. Her hand creeps across the space between them, curling at the back of Ivy’s neck like pale vines, tendriling. 

“Harley,” Ivy breathes her name like an admonishment. “You know we can’t.”

“One kiss never hurt nobody.” Harley puckers her bottom lip.

When she exhales, Ivy can feel the damp-humid of whiskey-soaked breath against her mouth. She swallows. Watches Harley’s gaze dip to follow the bob of her throat.

“One kiss?” she asks, and Harley’s smile sharpens.

“Just one,” Harley answers.

After, Ivy won’t remember who leans in first.

**

Harley’s kisses are frenetic.

She kisses the way she talks, a little hurried, her mouth curling up at the end, like a question. It’s all Ivy can do to take it, to slow her down, hands on her waist, climbing the rungs of her ribs with her fingers, thumbing at the swell of her breasts.

Harley has rolled on top of her, bearing down against Ivy in the damp sand. A knee slotted between Ivy’s thighs, frantic, like if she doesn’t take everything she can as quickly as possible, Ivy is going to ask her to stop.

“God, your _mouth_ , Red,” Harley sighs. She turns her face into the softness of Ivy’s cheek, finds the lobe of her ear with her teeth, suckles the metal stud of her earring. “After last night I –”

Ivy silences her with another kiss, slips her tongue into her mouth. Harley’s crop-top is riding up, and Ivy steals her fingers over the bared expanse of creamy skin, pinches at her waist just over the stick-n-poke Harley got drunk and on a dare.

It was her own dare, if Ivy remembers correctly, but that hadn’t stopped her. There’s a ribbon of raised skin just under her the knot of her hipbone, one of dozens of pale, ridged scars scattered across her body. Ivy never asks where Harley got them, and Harley never offers.

The tiki torches are burning down, defusing the air with sweet citronella, and Ivy’s head fuzzes from the whiskey. The susurration of the ocean creates a false sense of seclusion, briny air blowing warm across the cove, making it easier to excuse these indiscretions. She lets herself savor the weight of Harley’s body in the sling of her hips, long strands of her hair sneaking stubbornly into their mouths until they have to break the kiss, laughing.

Even as it’s happening, the evening has already taken on the cast of remembrance, like Ivy knows she is going to play her mind over these memories until they wear smooth – the open gasp of Harley’s mouth, her greedy hands, her touches lighter than the ones she’s used to.

Harley releases her bottom lip with a wet pop, looks down at her panting.

“Anyone ever tell ya’ you think real loud?” she asks her. Her eyes are wide. Ivy notices with a pleasurable jolt that Harley has already managed to get one hand down Ivy’s pants, playing her fingers just low enough to be a threat. Harley smiles, leans in, whispers against the corner of her mouth. “Quiet down.”

She catches her mouth in a kiss, then another, each one like a conversation, the give-and-take of nodding chins, bumping noses. Harley whimpers quietly against her mouth, hips rutting, the breaking-point rubber band tension of it settling low in Ivy’s stomach, body vibrating with the intensity of having something after wanting it for so long. After denying that wanting for even longer.

She commits each moment to memory, even as it happens. Trying to decide which details she can keep, which of them to shed, what she can leave here in the sand after they go. She’ll keep this, she decides: the way Harley pulls back, just so, and finds her eyes.

Her lipstick is all but kissed off, a pale strip rubbed away along the inside of her bottom lip. The soft pink flesh looks impossibly fragile.

Ivy reminds herself not to get too comfortable. Like all of Harley’s favorite games, they’ve played this one before.

Old habits die hard, or whatever. Harley’s hand dips lower.

Then – “Poison Ivy?”

The voice doesn’t belong to either of them, and Harley pulls back again, looking disgruntled.

Ivy turns her head, freezing mid-grope. There is a woman standing in the sand, looking down at them with a big smile, clinging to a coconut-shaped novelty cup that smells distinctly like rum. Ivy vaguely places her as one of the Amazons from earlier, hair braided back, her bronze armor breastplate partially unfastened.

Harley doesn’t remove her hand from Ivy’s pants, just glares up at the apparent intruder.

“Excuse me,” Harley says. “But could you fuck off?”

The Amazon barrels on, apparently ignoring her. “I heard you were here. I’m _such_ a big fan of your work.”

“Oh,” Ivy says. She slowly retracts her hands from Harley’s ass, half-sits up, dislodging an increasingly pissed Harley, who seemed to be debating the merits of fingering her in spite of the audience. “Thank you.”

“Your work last year in Eastern Australia?” The Amazon gestures out from her temples, sloshing her drink. “It just blew my mind.”

“Oh,” Ivy says again, brighter this time. “That really means a lot.”

It _was_ some of her best work. The BHP headquarters in Melbourne would be cleaning blood out of their carpet for _years._

“I’ll admit, that was one of my smaller jobs, I’m surprised you heard about it,” she tries not to sound too pleased. Still straddling her waist, Harley huffs.

“Great,” Harley says, a little snappish. “My Ivy does a lot of good work in a lot of places” – this accompanied by a fairly crude gesture, one that has Ivy biting her lip to hide a smile – “Did you catch that we’re in the middle of something?”

Ivy is almost surprised at Harley’s cold reception of the Amazon. Harley is usually something of a magnet for drunk girls in bar bathrooms, for Friday night sorority sisters on club dance floors. Like flies to honey, she would often disappear from a party mid-sentence only for Ivy to find her twenty minutes later in the ladies’ restroom, surrounded by an adoring crowd, dispensing advice and, more often than not, some ill-advised relationship tips.

The girl just seems to be catching on, and takes a long draw through an egregious curlicue straw sticking out of the coconut before answering. “Are you two, like, together? Or is there a little bit of wiggle room?”

Harley lunges quick enough that Ivy has to grab for the back of her shorts, bodily hauling her back into the sand.

“She’s my best friend, lady,” Harley says. It seems a little stale seeing as her hand was just down Ivy’s pants, but Harley powers on. “This is an invitation only kinda party.”

Unfazed, the girl shrugs. “Let me know if you change your mind,” she says to Ivy. She begins to wander off, and Ivy is careful to keep a fast grip on Harley’s shorts until she disappears from view.

Harley slumps back into her, turns her head to press a possessive kiss to the underside of Ivy’s chin, sand clinging to her knees, the heel of her palms.

“What a bitch,” Harley says. She flaps her hand at the beach and the ocean in turn, utterly put out. “Like, read the room.”

Ivy hums something like an agreement, fascinated by the popping muscles in Harley’s jaw, the newly soured cast of her pouting mouth. With two fingers, she touches the grit of Harley’s teeth through the soft plush of her cheek, the hard set of her jaw, and feels the tension bleed out of her as soon as she does. Ivy plies her further with a kiss to the corner of her mouth, coaxes her back onto her lap.

Harley curls there obligingly, knees drawn to her chest, proffering her face for more attention.

“You love me?” she asks. Like it’s a normal segue in the conversation they weren’t having. Ivy wonders what script Harley is reading when she isn’t looking. She thinks she’s forgotten her lines.

“You know I do.” The answer seems to appease whatever question Harley was actually asking, because she tilts her mouth flush to Ivy’s, the other girl apparently forgotten.

This, too, Ivy decides to keep: Harley’s smile against her lips, the warmth of her hand, sand-gritty and careful, coming to rest against her cheek.

**

“I really can’t do this,” she’s dragging her lips down Harley’s stomach, pressing her teeth against the jut of her hipbone hard enough to leave marks. “I really, really can’t.”

Harley is writhing underneath her, arching her back, hips jolting off the hotel room bed.

“Okay,” Harley says. Her voice is a gasp. She props up onto her forearms. “We can stop.” She looks ruined, a pink flush creeping up pale cheeks, lipstick smeared down her chin, her pupils a dark-drown that look flat and animal in the dim light.

Biting a kiss against her navel, Ivy feels Harley shudder. Hips jogging up against her mouth, arms shaking.

“We should stop,” Ivy agrees, licking a long stripe up the muscled, flat of Harley’s abdomen, the soft curve of her stomach.

They both know she won’t, but these are the lies they tell themselves to make the next morning bearable.

Harley whines, the noise shooting straight between Ivy’s legs. She’s babbling a little bit, every time Ivy’s mouth meets her skin, this constant running commentary. Ivy mouths at the inside of her thigh, just to hear her talk.

“That’s really good, Ive.” Hands tangle in her hair, tug. “You feel so, so good.” She reaches her own hand between her legs, and Ivy pushes it away, noses, instead, at the damp fabric, turns her cheek into the plush-soft of Harley’s inner thigh.

She pets a hand over the gusset of Harley’s panties through her shorts, watches the tendons in her own wrist ripple, like she’s above the room, above them, watching it all happen below.

“What the fuck, oh my God,” Harley gasps, shaking before Ivy’s even hardly touched her.

Ivy smiles into her skin, feels the answering throb in her cunt.

She conjures an echo of Harley from the night before, lit by club lights and an alcohol flush – _tell me a secret._

The secret is that Ivy isn’t even that drunk, that she sobered up sometime in-between Harley pushing her down into the sand, and the full fifteen minutes they spent necking against the against the hotel room door.

There’s a breeze fluttering through the sheer curtains of the balcony, and the sea-salt wind cools the flushed skin of her shoulders, the back of her neck. She’s still in her leggings and tank, the jacket crumpled somewhere in the foyer.

She couldn’t even tell you how they got back to the room. The journey was a slideshow of blurry sidewalks and streetlights, of Harley’s hands on her tits in the elevator, mugging for the security camera mounted in the corner.

Now, Ivy has her thumbs hooked in Harley’s shorts on auto-pilot, pulls them down until they bunch around her thighs. She can smell her now and, worse, can see her – her cunt glistening and pink, swollen, broken apart on itself.

“It doesn’t count if I just taste, right?” Ivy is the one babbling now, and Harley’s legs fall apart wider, opening her even more to Ivy’s eyes – the chalky skin of her inner thighs, the tight bud of her clit, her wetness, like petals unfurling.

Ivy lowers her mouth, ghosting a kiss against the angry red marks left behind by banded elastic, finds a bruise left there from last night, purpling in the half-light of the hotel room.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” Harley is gasping, lying for her sake. “I swear to God, I’ll be good. Please, Ivy.”

Ivy wriggles closer, body mussing the sheets, coaxes one of Harley’s legs over her shoulder, biting nails into the meat of her thigh.

From above, she watches her lips meet flesh, watches her cheeks-chin-mouth come away shining.

The secret is that it’s worth it, that she’s the one to blame.

**

Harley’s head is on her chest, and she folds into her, presses a kiss just below her collarbone.

“Do you want me to go?”

Like this, they are running out of excuses. Basking in some semblance of an afterglow, sweat shining on bare skin.

“Do you want to?”

Harley tilts her head to look up at her, arches to catch her mouth in a kiss instead of answering. It turns sloppy almost immediately, loose and nodding, something about 3 a.m.

Ivy lets Harley slip her tongue into her mouth without rebuke, fingers tightening at the small of her back.

“No,” Harley mumbles into her mouth. “But I think we need a pick-me-up.”

She rolls out of bed, takes the sheet with her, and Ivy startles at the sudden absence of warmth. She grabs for the comforter, shivers into it, watching Harley curiously.

She kneels in front of the minifridge, and Ivy rolls to her side, propping her head on her hand for a better view. The sheet drapes around Harley’s back, dragging on the floor, but it does little to cover the muscled line of her thigh, the hem, held half-heartedly to her chest, wilts at its corner, exposing the pink of a nipple, the weight of her breast.

Harley riffles through the fridge’s content, brow cutely furrowed, nose wrinkled. She shivers at the exhale of frigid air, and Ivy watches with a hungry-interest as her skin goosepimples, her nipple hardens.

“I don’t see anything too tempting,” Harley says. She produces an airplane bottle of vodka. Squints to read the label.

“I do,” Ivy says. It’s a cringy line, even by Harley’s standards, and she’s ready to laugh it off, but Harley shoots her a sideways look, pleased, cheeks pinking.

She seems to doubletake at the sight of Ivy there in bed, laid out on her side, comforter slunk low around her waist, hair falling in a red curtain, pooling in the sheets.

“How didn’t we do this sooner?” Harley husks, a little wondering, blush still clinging to the bridge of her nose.

Ivy doesn’t ask her what she means – the fucking? Round two? Round three? This post-sex conversation, bodies and desires laid bare?

None of it, all of it. She guesses it doesn’t really matter, not as long as they play pretend like none of this will matter in the morning.

Harley grabs for bottles at random on the first shelf, uncaring when others roll out in her rush, falling to the tiled floor. A few bottles shatter, liquid seeping under the rubber seal of the fridge, the sharp-clean alcohol smell perfuming the air.

Harley leaves the broken glass where it lands, jagged edges curved like the hull of a boat, shrapnel-like shards grinding into the fiber of the hall carpet.

Tossing the half-a-dozen unbroken mini-bottles toward the bed, she lets the sheet drop. She crawls back on all fours, artless, slinks onto the mattress, steals under the covers. Ivy squirms at the cool disruption of her skin, stifles a laugh as Harley collapses into her neck, burrowing cold fingers into her ribs, jabbing her feet into the meat of Ivy’s thighs.

“Your toes are fucking freezing,” Ivy protests, but opens her arms to let Harley worm closer, cocoons her in the close, dark of the comforter. Faces close, Harley steals a kiss, then another. Bites gently at the hinge of her jaw, finds Ivy’s smile with her mouth.

Harley cups her chest with a calloused palm, hums in delight.

“I have the best ideas,” she says gleefully, rubs a thumb over Ivy’s nipple. Watches her face closely for the eyelid flicker of pleasure.

“Do you?”

“When have I ever let you down?” Harley hushes, punctuated by a nip at her cheek, immediately followed by a soft kiss against the tip of her nose. This close, they are forced nearly cross-eyed when they look at each other. Ivy becomes briefly enamored by the downy, soft blonde hair on Harley’s arms.

“Aside from the countless times?”

“Obviously.”

The slide of bare skin is almost perversely visceral, tacky with sweat, loose sand shedding into the sheets. Against her thigh, she can feel Harley, still wet, and thinks about touching her again, indulgent and slow.

That would be the line, though. Sobering, with a hangover pulsing at the edge of her vision, she knows they’ve wrung the night dry. Unless –

“You going to get me a drink, or what?” she mumbles the words into the corner of Harley’s mouth. Kisses her top lip, then the bottom. Opens her eyes to find Harley already watching her.

“I thought you’d never ask.” She scrambles out of the comforter, kneeing Ivy in the gut in the process, and grabs for the first shot, tossing it toward the pillows at the head of the bed.

In the half-light of the hotel room, moonlight streaming through the curtains, Ivy feels it again – a flush of affection so keen, she almost doesn’t recognize it within the shape of her own body.

Like eating a ripe peach over the kitchen sink, Ivy relishes their time together, the juice-dripping ecstasy of it, hunger that pierces velvet skin and soft flesh. Ivy is overcome by the substance of her, like the anatomy of a peach’s small, furred body, the pulse of its pocked, wooden pit. Ivy reaches out silently to brush a light touch to the small of Harley’s back, finding the shallow divot at the base of her spine.

She thinks of the grace owed to the fruit and the tree that grew it. Thinks of the aftermath – juice staining fingers and dripping down wrists.

Ivy doesn’t always understand love. Conceptually it seems slippery and ill-defined, finite in the most human way. She’s seen Harley’s idea of love, watched her bruise under it, because of it, with a trembling, ecstatic certainty.

But like this – studying the bow of Harley’s shoulders, the sharp bones in her bare back, her hair falling into her eyes even as she leans back into Ivy’s touch – Ivy understands with the same certainty, and wonders if this makes a fool of her, too.

She watches Harley combing through the menagerie of tiny glass bottles, murmuring excitedly under her breath, as ecstatic as she always is by the prospect of more drinking, more debauchery, more _more._

Flush and lithe, a fervent bacchanal spirit, Harley moves with intensity, vision narrow, like she can’t stand to see where things will fall if she stops.

There is a plastic crackle as the seal of a bottle breaks, and Harley looks over her shoulder at Ivy with a sharp-toothed smile, swollen with a feverish kind of joy. She bends to kiss the cap of Ivy’s knee, raises the glass in a toast.

“What are we cheers-ing?” Ivy asks, lazily, she wiggles her toes against Harley’s leg, and Harley catches at her ankle with her free hand, thumbing at her skin gently.

At her own question, she remembers suddenly and terribly, that the purpose of the celebration is her impending wedding, that these nights are a perversion of future she has promised herself to. Harley must remember, too, because Ivy watches something dim at the corner of her eyes.

She follows through with the toast all the same, grip tightening around Ivy’s ankle, nails digging into the skin.

“To the Amazons and their open bar,” Harley says. Then narrows her eyes. “Except for that girl who hit on you. She seemed like a huge cunt.”

She drinks down three-quarters of the bottle, turns to Ivy with the rest.

Ivy opens her mouth obediently, accepts the last dredges of the drink, tame, but keeps her eyes open, watches for it – the moment, so brief she almost misses it entirely, when Harley’s face falls, rearranging itself like a sleight of hand.

She reaches for the next drink. 

They down them like a thousand ready-made excuses.

The electric blue airplane bottle of Hpnotiq is _we were drunk_ and _mistakes happen_ and _sometimes girls just want to have fun._

The vodka that follows – with Harley creatively deciding to lick the shot out of Ivy’s bellybutton before choking on her swallow and dribbling it onto Ivy’s stomach – is _experimenting is natural_ and _bachelorette parties are supposed to get a little wild anyhow_ and _what happens in Themyscira…._

The Captain Morgan that Ivy neatly laps out of the notch of Harley’s collarbone, payback for the Bacardi fiasco, fuzzes her vision, clouding her head, makes her think it’s possible she wasn’t as sober as she thought, to begin with.

Burning through her chest, the rum blurs the line back to a comforting softness and insists _this is just what best friends do_ and _you came once in my mouth and again on my fingers and one more time won’t hurt someone who never has to know._

She presses a kiss to the hollow of Harley’s throat.

“That feels real good, baby,” Harley says, knots her hands in her hair, and holds Ivy’s teeth against her neck. “Harder, harder.”

That’s new. Both the pet name and the request. It’s the first time Harley’s words have sounded like a line, like she’s reading a stilted script. Ivy is loath to do something that will hurt her, and there is a wrongness as she bites down, sucks hard, skin bruising under her tongue.

Harley hisses like it hurts, but her hands tighten in Ivy’s hair, and she keeps pressing, arches her back under the weight of Ivy’s hips. Ivy bites again, lower this time, hard against a pale shoulder, and when Harley whimpers, Ivy feels the phantom pain, like punishment.

She pulls back, turns her head into Harley’s chest. She suddenly longs just to hold her, to bury her mouth and chin in the cavity of her chest, to come away dripping.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she says, and knows as soon as the words leave her mouth that it was the wrong thing to say.

Harley tightens an arm around Ivy’s neck in reply, fumbles for Ivy’s wrist, pulls it between her own legs.

“Harder,” she says again. Then, quieter. “Please.”

Ivy feels the salt-swell in the back of her throat, sorrow lumping, like she could cry all at once, Harley’s fingers scrabbling at her wrist, Harley’s breath hiccupping under her ear.

She fits a finger against her, waits for Harley’s voice to hitch and catch, presses inside until her inhale breaks into a moan, a wet click in the back of her throat.

Harley tightens her arms around Ivy, forces her closer until Ivy cannot pull away to look at her eyes when she tries. She makes her fuck her until it hurts, until feels like playacting, like performance.

Ivy’s longing cleaves. She wants the moment to stop almost as completely as she wants it to never end. She is desperate for the sun to stay below the horizon, for them to remain suspended on this stage, with Harley broken underneath her, sweat beading from the friction between them.

She buries her face over Harley’s heartbeat, presses a kiss against her breastbone even as her hand doesn’t falter. An apology, for something, for everything. Harley’s arms loosen their hold and, tender enough Ivy thinks she imagines it, a hand strokes gently through Ivy’s hair.

When the sun comes up, they wake on separate pillows. After they bolt out of bed, Ivy will keep only this: the writhe of Harley’s body under hers, a purpling bruise on Harley’s neck, and an unwillingness to meet her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> sorry im about 27 years late to the harlivy party. ive never said no to unrequited lust and built-in heartbreak in my entire life, and im not about to start now. as always, find me on tumblr @nevervalentines


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